A touring exhibition, showcasing Stockton and Darlington Railway’s (S&DR) momentous history, is steaming into Darlington as part of the celebrations of the first passenger railway.
Whistle Stop, presented by the S&DR200 Festival, gives visitors the chance to step back 200 years in time to see important documents and images from the birth of the modern railway. The exhibition is an introduction to the very start of the S&DR story
The documents have been brought together from archives across the UK and include engineer drawings and rarely seen maps, as well as cultural paintings, poems and cartoons, depicting the adventurous and strange inventions of the age!
Niccy Hallifax, S&DR200 festival director, said: “This touring exhibition has already delighted visitors in Durham and Stockton-on-Tees libraries, and I hope local residents will come along and see this impressive collection of artefacts from around the country. The Whistle Stop is a fascinating insight into the birth and subsequent development of the modern railway into what we see today.”
The exhibition will be at Shildon Library from 31st July – 20th August, before returning to Darlington to the Friends Community Hub on Skinnergate from 25th August – 3rd September and Locomotion, Shildon from 6th September – 4th October.
Visitors to Darlington library can also see some of the peg dolls made for A Memory of a Journey, a mass-participation story-telling art project taking place across Tees Valley and County Durham which sees community groups and residents decorate peg dolls representing their favourite train journey. They will be showcased in an exhibition at Preston Park Museum in the summer.
The nine-month S&DR200 Festival is celebrating the historic first journey on the Stockton and Darlington Railway with a series of impressive free large-scale outdoor spectacles, events, exhibitions and new art commissions in the public spaces, libraries and world-class museums of Tees Valley and County Durham until November.
Keep on track with how to get involved via our social media channels, the Enjoy Darlington website: www.enjoydarlington.co.uk and the S&DR200 web: www.sdr200.co.uk